Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is back from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, but our coverage isn’t over yet! Check out our continuing TIFF 2024 coverage, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
Revisionist musicals are intriguing conceptually but very rarely executed well. For clarity’s sake, I mean the kind of musical that regards the kind of aesthetic fantasy that the form provides for the audience, not something like Little Shop of Horrors or a direct parody: Think The Singing Detective or Pennies from Heaven. Perhaps a better term might be “anti-musical,” as they use the style to directly critique the plucky temperament of the genre, presenting us, to quote Tom Waits, with “beautiful melodies” that tell “you terrible things.” But it seems that the Scandinavians have settled on this as their lot in life, and Joshua Oppenheimer, much like Lars von Trier, has reached the point in his career where he feels he needs to make a florid thesis statement. Films like Dancer in the Dark or Oppenheimer’s latest, The End, are aesthetic variations of the same ethos presented in their prior work.
In von Trier’s case, he at least had Bjork as a collaborator and star, who contributed to the things that separate that film from, say, Breaking the Waves, even as they’re both magical-realist tragedies in which naivety smashes head-on against cruelties perpetrated by fate, inflicted upon our protagonist by its agents: Men. Oppenheimer, on the other hand, has spent his career crafting documentaries like The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, which used absurdist conceits to pierce their subjects’ defenses and get them to confront the truth of their actions. Like von Trier, Oppenheimer made fantastic films that are, depending on one’s perspective, ethically compromised – the ambiguity makes them all the more cutting or repellant – at least until The End, a ”golden age musical” that fails on nearly every front.
Once again, he’s made a movie about the lies we tell ourselves in order to keep going and living through our day-to-day lives. However, this time, it’s a full-on fictional narrative set in the post-apocalypse inside of a bunker housing a family of oil barons who directly had a hand in forcing the mega-rich into their vaults. There’s Father (Michael Shannon), once the head of an energy company who now spends his days writing a memoir for, presumably, the hyper-advanced robots at the end of Spielberg’s AI to read; Mother (Tilda Swinton) was once a dancer, but now she spends her days reorganizing the various paintings that line their walls to better suit the seasons; and Son (George McKay), who has spent his entire life inside the bunker, who helps his parents with their tasks, and in his free time, builds models of a world long passed by. They have helpers – Father brought his butler and body man (Tim McInnery), Mother brought her best friend (Bronagh Gallagher), and they’re all treated by the Doctor (Lennie James) – each of whom is nursing some secret that they’ve all agreed not ever to discuss. But, as is required in these scenarios, an outsider comes into their midst: they find a Girl (Moses Ingram) collapsed near the exit of their rocky bunker’s limestone walls and have to figure out what to do with her.
Previously, they’d simply kill the girl, and that’d be it – Father says as much while he’s training Son on their makeshift firing range – but there’s some amount of controversy about the usual choices. It’s been decades since they’ve had to do this, and they weren’t sure anyone was left up there. But Father, for whatever reason, has a change of heart, much to the astonishment of Mother, and the Girl begins to live with them. She’s scarred by her experiences in the wasteland, as a tragedy forced her to abandon her family to try and survive, and now she’s found herself in a comparative paradise, where everything she could ever want is available to her. There’s no struggle down in the bunker, only the monotony of contentment, undercut by all the awful things one had to do to wind up living through the end of the world in peace and security. The Son slowly falls in love with the girl, whose temperament and knowledge of the world outside are as attractive to him as she is herself, and he comes to understand that his existence is built on well-constructed lies and yadda yadda. You might think there would be more to the film’s narrative with that set-up. You’d be wrong: The End is an exercise in understanding their guilt and the delusions that enable them to continue on, much as every one of Oppenheimer’s films was previously. Not much happens, and the director hopes that this aesthetic variation on his themes and the presentation of recognizable faces are enough to endow it with novelty.
Having a specific vision for your revisionist musical is a double-edged sword: On the one hand, you get to draw from a legacy stretching back as long as sound cinema itself, and on the other, you give yourself a standard to live up to. Despite taking every single opportunity, including in his pre-film introduction, to stress aesthetic intentions, Oppenheimer has a drastically different perception of the “Golden Age Musical” than most, with the visual and sonic styles hewing less to the glory days of Warner Bros. and MGM than modern avant-garde off-off-Broadway go-nowhere productions. The book is almost deliriously ill-composed, feeling as if he’d written the lyrics long before he ever sat down with a composer to construct the songs. They’re arrhythmic and shockingly slapdash, and in the process, he breaks one of the cardinal rules of the musical: Don’t have your talent fighting with the orchestra.
This could very well be due to the acoustics of the Princess of Wales theater, where the film premiered. Still, the strings smother a meek singer like Swinton, rendering her verses almost unintelligible as her melody drifts further and further away from what the backing track is playing. Ingram and Shannon have a better go at it, and their songs are the few that feel like they were designed to complement their vocals rather than compete with them. As such, the result is less “golden age” and more of a bizarre hybrid between Disney revival features and Demy-like lyrical dialogue – it might have made more sense conceptually had the actors sung every line they spoke, like in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which paired cinematic and musical ambition to create something befitting the medium in which it was ultimately presented.
Yet this isn’t the fault of composer Marius de Vries (who worked on La La Land, Annette, and Moulin Rouge) or Joshua Schmidt, who co-wrote the film’s music. After all, they’re employed in service of Oppenheimer’s vision, which is severely lacking. The End is nothing if not a bleak and empty presentation of the coziest of catastrophes, in which our characters are enabled through privilege provided to them both by the narrative and within it to escape consequence or even self-reflection. If you were to condense The Act of Killing or The Look of Silence down into a single pithy sentence, it would be something like “The filmmaker says to the subject, ‘You’re lying to yourself.’” Regardless of the ethics of his prior projects, there’s something fundamentally brave about doing that to men who made up stories to shield themselves psychologically while committing genocidal war crimes in the Indonesian mass killings in the ‘60s.
But applying that same ethos to a fictional narrative that seems dedicated to ensuring nothing happens due to the revelation of these lies and actions reeks of intellectual fatigue. He sets up red herring after red herring, implying that, eventually, something will come to make their nightmares come true and force them to confront the truth outside a flight of fancy. Yet nothing ever does. In the end, everyone is let off the hook: they want to be there. We’re merely left with the echoes of his documentary work, eschewing narrative freedom in anything other than concept and style to gaze at the already well-explored navel of his worldview.
Oppenheimer spent the last eight years working on this project, and I can’t imagine that funding it might have been easy –there are something like 30 film institutes and production companies listed in the film’s opening titles — and executing a vision of this scale conceptually could not have been easy. Yet the film is almost decidedly anti-cinematic, as the production probably would have worked better on the stage, given the limited number of locations and characters. There’s not much Oppenheimer can do to make it visually stimulating, nor does he relish the chance to use the film’s songs to provide real escapism: the characters are trapped in their prison, which extends to the ends of the shooting locations, and all they can do is some soft-shoe on the limestone floor. The color scheme is a desaturated blue-grey to match the “exterior” walls, with the occasional warm tone popping in at an opportune moment, a deliberate but poorly applied inversion of his previous motifs, which were rich and colorful, befitting their setting. While it might be aesthetically coherent – the visuals match the plainness of the songs, which in turn complement the static nature of the characters, which are crafted to ensure that the story remains deliberately unengaging – it’s certainly dull as hell, failing to live up to even the most basic of its promises.
Perhaps Oppenheimer took Eliot too literally: Here’s a series of hollow men and women, ensuring they whimper their way through the end of the world and its aftermath, all to remind us that life is very long when you lie to yourself. The End deserves neither infamy nor praise; your only hope is to avoid these empty song-and-dance numbers unless you wish to stretch two hours into a blue-grey eternity in which you can feel your fingernails grow as the band strikes up and McKay gets ready for another song.